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Near Antwerp

BY Kurt Brown

At Mortsel-Oude God station
the round white face of a clock
declares the hour. Its second hand
revolves as though searching
for something, like the sweeping beam
on a radar screen. The trees
must think it’s some kind of strange
mollusk winding its way slowly,
infinitely slowly, back into itself,
spiral by spiral through a narrowing
set of rooms. There are no people
around. Nothing has happened
since 1943. The trees turn
toward each other, silent and appraising.
Death still squats over Belgium,
a blank sky herding umbrellas
into the street, interminable rain.
When history returns, it’ll be more of the same:
negotiations, betrayal, murder.Why pay any attention at all
whisper the trees. They turn
their backs, they can’t be bothered.

Biography

KURT BROWN founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference, and Writers’ Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors). His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill (University of Akron Press, 2005) and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), which he co-edited with Harold Schechter. Brown is the author of six chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Return of the Prodigals, (Four Way Books, 1999), More Things in Heaven and Earth, (Four Way Books, 2002), Fables from the Ark, (WordTech Communications, 2004), and Future Ship (Red Hen Press, 2008), as well as a new collection, No Other Paradise, (Red Hen Press, 2010). A collection of the poems of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck entitled The Plural of Happiness, which he and his wife translated, was released in the Field Translation Series in 2006. He teaches poetry workshops and craft classes at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and was recently the McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia as well as a visiting writer at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah.